Expat Days by Steve Rosse

Author:Steve Rosse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: booksmango
Published: 2014-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

A River Runs Through It

I hate boats. I figure that if God had wanted us to float around on the ocean, he’d have made us all Styrofoam Big Mac cartons. But I love to fish. When I was ten years old my grandfather taught me how to fish on the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles, which he said reminded him of the river jetties in his hometown of Vilnius, Lithuania. I think now that he liked fishing because it was the only recreation affordable by an uneducated immigrant, and while I can remember him teaching me how to knot a line and bait a hook, I don’t remember ever learning how to remove a hook from a fish’s mouth on the Santa Monica pier. Either grandpa was no fisherman, or the bay was already dead even then, but either way I still learned to love fishing.

That’s why I don’t read fishing magazines. They’re always written by guys named Bubba, who appear in grainy shapshots on the stern of over-designed motorboats, usually standing next to a fighting chair that looks like something you’d find in a medieval gynecologist’s office. They’ve always got the fingers of one hand wrapped around a can of beer and the fingers of the other hand holding up some unfortunate monster by his gill slits. The Bubbas with their articles on “Mad Dog Albacore Off The Seychelles!” always miss the point, in my opinion.

And even though I live on the island of Phuket, tucked into the armpit of the Andaman Sea and surrounded by some of the best fishing grounds in the world, I never go deep-sea fishing. Whenever I get the urge to get my sinker wet, I head straight for the Chalong Fishing Park.

The park consists of four ponds, which up until somebody got a marketing brainstorm ten years ago were simply the irrigation reservoirs for a system of family-owned vegetable farms. These freeholds cover a tiny valley set between two ranks of medium-to-small mountains. The valley is far enough from the beaches and main roads to have been overlooked by the resort developers who have, in a few short years, turned a sleepy little tin-mining island into The World’s Premier Vacation Destination, and the area appears today much as it has for a century. The only signs of civilization to be seen from beside the ponds are the golden roofs of Chalong Temple at the open mouth of the valley.

The ponds are fed and connected by streams that begin in the mountains, and under the sound of the wind there’s always the clatter of falling water. Each pond has a resident family of feral ducks who dive in the weeds for lost bait. Decrepit gazebos of bamboo and palm thatch ring the ponds. For 20 baht per hour, you get a gazebo, a rusty old rod with some knotted nylon line, and a plastic bag full of evil-smelling pseudo-bait. There’s a surprisingly good restaurant to order drinks from, and if you should happen to catch anything big enough to eat they’ll be happy to prepare it for you.

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